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Mac Rants
There's a piece by Scott Wasson regarding the claims of Apple, of late, and his...feelings on it. It's a pretty ranty piece, as he says in the beginning, but it's a good discussion starting piece - even tho' I disagree with him to a degree.
I primarially use PCs, but recently obtained a second-hand iMac (Rev C. 266MHz G3, 6GB, 32MB RAM) to get familar with the platform and possibly port some of my Windows programs I've written to it. First thing to go was that stupid urinal puck mouse, I replaced it with a USB trackman marble.
;) playback, cause "it ain't happenin' mon!" While even on a measily PII 233MHz you can play MP3s in the background with Winamp with no skipping or noticable performence hit, the iMac's MP3 playback via Quicktime skipped and slowed the system to a crawl. Yuck. As expected, Photoshop was fast and stable. Connectix virtual game station (PSX Emulator) ran at roughly the speed the PC version does on a PII 350MHz... Not bad, not bad at all. SNES9X seems to perform better than the PII 233MHz, but not as good as the PII 350MHz. Shockwave web animations seemed sluggish, but no worse than the PII 233MHz. Web pages seemed to render much faster on the PII 233MHz, though. So much for the Mac as a browsing platform.
Opinions about Windows aside, 98lite runs at acceptable speeds in 32MB of RAM. Sure, RAM is cheap, so there really is no excuse to have *that* little amount of RAM... On the Mac however, 32MB with OS 8.6 is unusable. With virtual memory disabled, you get "Out of memory" messages left and right - with it turned on, the system swaps, and swaps, and SWAPS. Yuck. Okay, time to buy more RAM.
The system didn't seem terribly stable for web browsing... Browsing the web with the latest IE or Netscape would frequently crash every few hours or so, Force quit almost never worked, usually it just brought up the dialog box and left the system in a frozen state. Overall, MacOS 8.6 seems roughly as stable as Windows 3.1. I hope OS X is a lot better.
Performence widely varied with the task being performed. Forget about good performence Divx
Overall, this wasn't a bad system... Not cutting edge, but at least as useful as my low end PII PCs. Well, it *was*... Then it got an Invalid PEOF error after an application crash and refuses to boot from the hard drive unless I reinitalize and reinstall. I can boot from a MacOS CD, but it refuses to let me eject it so I can insert one with Norton on it. If the damn thing only had a floppy drive... Eventually, I'll get around to buying a bootable Diskwarrior CD so I can get the damn thing working again without reformatting.
All things considered, it has been a nice learning experience; however, PCs are still my platform of choice.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
(hardware that, except for VirtualPC and Linux, has NO alternative operating systems), because of Windows licensing costs? "Nazism?" I'm not Windows fan, but what kind of logic is that? You don't even have third party choice of hardware for the Mac, let alone software diversity.
current apple hardware will run linux, netbsd, openbsd, darwin, os x, and os 9. older apple hardware will also run things like beos, a/ux, developer releases of rhapsody and copland, etc. so you're wrong on that point.
as for third party hardware, its true that apple produces all the full systems. but i've got a ton of third party hardware in my machines, ranging from IBM drives to no-name PCI cards for USB and ethernet.
try looking at some reasonably recent statistics before you make sweeping claims, eh?
(incidentally, this whole "story" is flamebait shite, in my ever humble opinion.)
--saintReally, we like that kind of stuff at K5. And, while you're there, check out Bubba.
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i cant believe this actually got posted on /.
the ranter is unhappy with some irrelevant, biased, uninformed articles, and counters with an irrelevant, biased, uninformed article of his own. newsflash: the web is full of irrelevant, biased, uninformed articles. why are we posting scriptkiddie flamewars on /.?
apples official position is here. there is nothing wrong with it. as they point out at expos, they use photoshop benchmarks because it is the app their customers use most (they actually use real jobs their customers have done, like movie posters, etc).
as anyone who knows anything about benchmarks can tell you (hopefully all of /.) different benchmarks tell you different things. use the benchmark that applies to your job/situation. yes, the g4 is much faster at floating point. yes, the pentium runs office apps much faster. whoop-de-doo. whats new here?
i will leave all the inaccuracies of the article to other posters (no, photoshop /is/ optimized for sse)
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
I read the rant, big whoop. He's citing a comparison by someone I've spoken to on a Mac forum from time to time. The point of his comparisons (he's done several) is not that the Macintosh will solve world hunger or anything. He was trying to debunk the myth that Macs are expensive in a bang-for-your-buck method. In other words, he tried tricking out systems from various windows OEMs and Apple's online store, compared prices, and guess what? The Mac came out even and sometimes ahead of the others.
This, apparently, caused an uninformed rant that /.'s dieties decided was newsworthy. Boy, this place has gotten so far downhill I may have to turn to NFL Fantasy League boards for higher levels of erudition and intellectual stimulation.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
I agree that it is difficult to measure all the features of such different platforms, but the pointsystem he uses is totally screwed.
Example: The Apple-box gets 2 points for 2MB L3 cache, but the pentium-boxes only get 0.5 point extra for 400MHz System Bus against Apples 133MHz. What is the need of L3 cache when you have a such fast system?
And that he gives points for both hardware and software in the same test isn't quite the way to do it. He gives points in the range 5,5-7,5 for major software included, while giving 2,5-3,0 points for the size of the harddisk.
Those things aren't exactly in the same area. He should rather have done to test, a hardware, and a software. But nowadays, what software you can run on the computer is less important, because you can do what you want no most computers today anyway. So I would say that hardware alone is a better method of comparision.
Though, in the earlier days, the major problems with running different architectures and platforms, was that you didn't have the same programs, they were quite incompatible with eachother, and there was major differences in performance in similar programs.
I know I bought a Mac because it looked good and felt good, and that has no bearing on MHz or performance.
That is a much better argument to buy a Mac, than because "it is better (because I read it in a test...)" :)
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
With respect to processor speed, faster is better and necessary, as always, is a myth. I run a 400 MHz G4. At my last job I ran a 600 MHz or so Pentium. MS office on both machines ran about the same. Netscape on both machines ran about the same. SETI@Home ran faster on the G4. For most of my purposes, the platforms are to close to call. The clock speed for Windows machines needs to be fast not only for hardware reasons, but because MS, unlike Apple, has a tendency to shamelessly waste cycles.
The same is true for hard disk space. By current standards I have a very small hard disk on my G4, around 9 GB. With MacOS 9 and a very full compliment of programs and data loaded, including Virtual PC, and 640-MB virtual disk, I still have 3 GB left. Again, MS like to waste space, so a machine that runs windows needs a larger hard disk.
I may get a Windows machine if I use it regularly. The hectic upgrade and patch schedule has kept from acquiring one in the past. Likewise, I need to get a *nix machine up and running again. I just haven't had the spare hardware. Until then, my trusty G4 will serve and protect me for the evil empire. It costs more, but what can you do.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Takes ages swapping PCI cards etc? PowerMac G4: You pull a lever, opens the side of the box in one single swing, and can when insert PCI-cards. How many OTHER minitower is that easy, huh? On the cube - you flip it upside down. Press a lever, and takes out the whole box, and can easily put in memory and airport. Even change graphiccard. Sure, the harddisc takes a bit more time. iMac. Sorry - no PCI slots. Alas, adding memory is on silent models extremely easily. Open the lid at the back, put in SDRAM, put the lid back. Hard, huh? Even the laptops is quite OK, except airportcard on TiBook, and harddisc on Icebook. Memory is easily changed, and airport is easily added (on icebook) Whats your real problem mizta?
K5 has it's problems, but so does slashdot. It's not like one site is unquestionably better than the other.
This time I remembered to use
tags! Sorry...
My problem has always been that Apple doesn't like to let other people inside their boxes
Sure, if you buy an iFruit, Apple definitely doesn't want you opening one of those up, since the target audience is those who couldn't tell a resistor from a capacitor. However, the G4 tower case designs are very accessible, and make it really easy to install new hardware.
Beside that, Apple is making an active effort to help PCI hardware vendors write drivers for MacOS X in their upcoming I/O Kit PCI Kitchen on August 28th. This is a free workshop for developers to bring in hardware, and get help writing drivers.
It took them ages to finally put several expansion slots in their boxes.
If you look into the history of Apple computers, you'd find out that the fifth Macintosh model released, the Macintosh II (1987) had 6 NuBus expansion slots. I've got one in my basement, it's quite a beefy chunk o' plastic.
Article on the Mac II for those interested.
Three years since the original Mac 128k. So it took a while, but I don't think that qualifies for "ages". Especially considering this was back in the day when a 40 MB hard drive waas still optional.
This is not entirely correct. IBM for the most part uses POWER processors in the pSeries and iSeries machines. The POWER line is a direct descendant from the arch that spawned the PPC. The processors used in these boxes are 64-bit implementations of the ISA and for the most part are a LOT faster than the PPC's that Apple sells. These machines have numbers listed on the spec.org (the only benchmark organization who's sole goal is to provide a cross platform level playing field) page. You would do well to
look at SpecINT/SpecFP if your interested in processor bound workstation type system loads.
My Macs are under my desks; I don't particularly care how they look.
Where I see the elegance is on the screen, and selling Windows machines won't help with that.
For instance, all the Photoshop benchmarks in the world can't explain why I vastly prefer the Mac for Photoshop: The mouse movement is much more smooth and natural. I can't do any fine-detail work with a mouse in Windows (as an experiment, try moving the mouse pointer in a little circle repeatedly as fast as possible with both machines. On the Windows machine, if your hand is anything like mine, the circle tracks across the screen and takes on a NW-SE ovoid shape). Worse still, when you have the mouse speed/acceleration set to any reasonable levels on Windows, it actually SKIPS PIXELS even when you're moving it as slowly as possible. So you end up having to zoom way all the time to get things done.
And don't even get me started on fonts, default locations for open/save dialogs, etc.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS